lethal wrote:Ever since I moved offices to one with a window, I can't work nearly as late as I used to.

5 PM feels so late and I'm exhausted by the time 8 PM rolls around. Without a window, I couldn't see that it was dark outside and I could work till 11 no problem.

Now, of course, 1 AM on a Saturday night, in the office, I'm really dragging. Hopefully I can get out of here by 2. All so I can avoid coming in tomorrow...have a nice big Eagles-Giants game to watch tomorrow!

This makes me want to off myself.

VoxOrion wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:

VoxOrion wrote:Remember when all good cultured and sensitive little boys and girls were supposed to learn sign language?

I do not remember that.

I thought we were relatively close in age. Watch that Sesame Street thing MrsVox posted in some other thread. It was everywhere for a while there. I think learning Spanish replaced it, and now No Bullying has replaced that.

yes, no bullying is back with a vengeance - it's something I do monitor in my classroom but my room is isolated in the building and, this year at least, I teach mostly upper level kids (not to say they are necessarily nicer to one another, but their bullying is usually of the intellectual variety). So much of the shit happens on social networking sites these days and obvious bullying rarely happens in front of an astute teacher. It was made clear to us at our last faculty meeting that every little thing that raises a question in your mind needs to be reported.

I'm glad for the no bullying focus, I have some personal experience with that. I also think you make a really important point - kids have such a vast ability to harass one another outside of school and in front of such a large audience now it's really worrisome. I was reviewing a lot of the material/posters/etc. at my son's school, but I know from talking to him that human nature is human nature - maybe some more kids will speak up - but for the most part, I know he's no more likely to report bullies than he ever was. We've also already seen or heard of one-off incidents where the term "bully" was expanded to mean "difference of opinion". I'm always worried that things like this take on a life of their own and end up broadening terms to the point where they no longer have any real meaning. Hopefully these remain isolated incidents limited to ignorant adults.

I was talking to the former headmaster of Gloucester Catholic High School - he said that (in his isolated but hardly limited experience) primary school is way meaner and worse than high school. He found that smaller children are so much more geared to law of the jungle than their older peers. Not that bullying doesn't occur in high school - but the message he conveyed is that it is more limited but far more severe in high school when it does happen.

VoxOrion wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:

VoxOrion wrote:Remember when all good cultured and sensitive little boys and girls were supposed to learn sign language?

I do not remember that.

I thought we were relatively close in age. Watch that Sesame Street thing MrsVox posted in some other thread. It was everywhere for a while there. I think learning Spanish replaced it, and now No Bullying has replaced that.

I think what came before was learning that gender was a social construct. But it wasn't put that way. It was "Free to be You and Me" featuring Marlo Thomas and the guy from MASH.

I do remember once in awhile there would be a Juan or Juanita in a math book word problem.

Also, there was the metric system. I still think we should go to using that.

TenuredVulture wrote:I think what came before was learning that gender was a social construct. But it wasn't put that way. It was "Free to be You and Me" featuring Marlo Thomas and the guy from MASH.

It's funny, when I returned to college some 15 years after leaving high school, I was shocked to have a science professor exclaim "Men and women are not the same, nature trumps nurture, this is settled scientific fact and don't let anyone tell you otherwise." Then he proceeded to spend the next module showing all of the significant biological differences between the male brain and female brain, etc. Anyway - the point is, this was a surprise for me, I didn't realize that the dogma had shifted so drastically and so quickly from the late 80's/early 90's through the early 2000's.

I ate at Bojangles for the first time ever this morning. I might as well have been hit over the head with a sledge hammer, kicked in the stomach and thrown down a cliff and left for dead.

bojangles biscuits!

I keep getting copies of Maxim mailed to me for some reason. What a jumbled mess of zero content that thing is. Apparently a couple pictures of scantily clad women is enough to keep any magazine in print.

You guys are too young to remember the Bill Cosby in a cool leather jacket "Racism is Bad" film -- yeah, we had films back then.

The teachers were also forced to teach that Slavery was ABSOLUTELY NOT a cause of the Civil War -- it had something to do with Cotton Tarriffs or something. I can't remember exactly how they tied in the Lincoln election starting the whole thing. Maybe he was a Polyester man or something.

do people lease cars? it doesn't seem like a very good deal

It seems pretty common (in my experience) among small business people. The folks who own my company and its parent lease their luxury cars. I've read that for cars that hold their value well it's a decent deal. Particularly if you are under pressure to keep a current image (like a salesperson).

Basically, it's a way to have a new car every three years, and it's easy to manage from a budgeting standpoint--you aren't going to have to haggle over the value of a trade in.

TenuredVulture wrote:Basically, it's a way to have a new car every three years, and it's easy to manage from a budgeting standpoint--you aren't going to have to haggle over the value of a trade in.

you can have a new car every 2-3 years without leasing, and even doing a wimpy job on a sale (fuck haggling a trade-in with whomsoever you're buying from) you come out better than lease terms

I can see a business having a financial advantage, not consumers

I remember when leasing became common and I would read articles describing the circumstances in which leasing was better than buying. But the articles had too many numbers and too much math and made my head hurt.

We've only had to make car payments for around 4 of the past 16 years and not since 2005 so leasing would not make sense for us.

smitty wrote:I remember when leasing became common and I would read articles describing the circumstances in which leasing was better than buying. But the articles had too many numbers and too much math and made my head hurt.

We've only had to make car payments for around 4 of the past 16 years and not since 2005 so leasing would not make sense for us.

It's the situation you've enjoyed the past 16 years that appeals to me, Smitty. It seems like not paying for a car and having one to drive is much better than having to pay every month to have a car to drive.

& I hate cars in general so the new car/used car thing does not register for me

It's inconvenient once every great while, but I kind of love not having a car. At its worst it allows me to tell people they need to come visit me if we're gonna hang out.

I wish Die Hard was on

Slowhand wrote:I ate at Bojangles for the first time ever this morning. I might as well have been hit over the head with a sledge hammer, kicked in the stomach and thrown down a cliff and left for dead.

i have only had lunch there. it is awful. i dont know why people like it.

I bought lottery tickets when I went to the liquor store after the game

If I win the lottery, that would make the loss worthwhile

smitty wrote:You guys are too young to remember the Bill Cosby in a cool leather jacket "Racism is Bad" film -- yeah, we had films back then.

The teachers were also forced to teach that Slavery was ABSOLUTELY NOT a cause of the Civil War -- it had something to do with Cotton Tarriffs or something. I can't remember exactly how they tied in the Lincoln election starting the whole thing. Maybe he was a Polyester man or something.

Wow, I guess this film I saw in grade school was, in essence, an anti-bullying film. It was called "cipher in the snow". They picked on this poor girl so much that one day she just literally lost the will to live and keeled over in the snow, and died. Her last action was to write a "0" in the snow to signify that's what her life meant. After the film we were taught that "cipher" was another word for "zero". I'm so glad that nowadays they have anorexia as a cure for low self esteem instead of this keeling over thing that was apparently prevalent in the 70's.